Amazon has released its updated version of the Kindle, the portable book reader. The original Kindle was ugly, heavy, and had too many sharp edges. The updated Kindle has been slimmed down and smoothed. It has longer battery life, and much better graphics (still black and white, though). This new version may actually catch on.
The Kindle comes with 2 Gig of memory, enough to store over 1,000 books, and new books can be added via Kindle's wireless interface to the Sprint cellphone network. This new Kindle seems to be right in the ballpark for technical manuals that change quickly and for one time reads like most best-selling books. But I think this could also be the future of newspapers. I could see sitting down to breakfast with a cup of coffee and the Kindle and browsing the local news. It might even be worth paying a subscription fee to get the news formatted nicely to work on the Kindle.
If Amazon wants to win in the bookreader game, it should study all the early missteps Adobe made with the PDF file format back in the early nineties. It should be easy to get all kinds of common formats on the Kindle, especially PDFs, and it needs to be dead simple for content owners to transfer files and documents to the Kindle.